QNX floppy?
Tom's boot floppy?

Slitaz maybe?

If I recall, 18 years ago on the first laptop I bought, I used DSL (Damn Small Linux) which was a 50MB distro that would run from the most modest of USB thumb drives.

And luckily I remember when the web *was* just text... We've gone from 500 MBS to 60 and it will eventually be 2 when the move finally takes place. Weirdly the 60 has been extremely irritating (partly because it is unpredictable. Unpredictable fast and slow is hard to accept). But the 2 MBS hasn't bothered us (so far). I'm the impatient one and with large mods it's probably likely to affect me most but I really just don't care... It's a slower life.

My favourite **name** so far is Damn Small Linux!!! I really have to try that one. I've seen the home page and that project has made me smile!

As a lightweight browser, I can recommend the graphical version of links. It doesn't do javascript, so some things like gmail won't work, but it is very fast.

Tiny Core Linux is the later version of DamnSmallLinux, same creator.

Dillo might be an option on a slow connection too.

On the subject of SSE2, Intel introduced that in the Pentium 4 and the Pentium M, but none of the 32-bit AMDs have it. You can still get one browser that provides reasonable facilities — it's not much use having one that won't let you shop! — the special SSE version of PaleMoon. The javascript is very slow though, and some sites (e.g. reddit) don't work.

That really made me laugh!

I've put PaleMoon on the list to look at (just went briefly to their page) and Dillo as well. Both look very interesting. Actually, you've touched upon something that has been bothering me anyway - what to use instead of Firefox on my main PC. So these will be interesting to look at. Thanks! I also had a look at Links - it made me quite nostalgic!

Thanks everyone for the ideas! As I say, I'm not likely to be reunited with this laptop till next year but I'm really excited about trying out the suggestions!

This has been a really interesting thread for me too - I was about to post almost exactly the same question (except that it's an ancient Acer box) when I found this one. I'm downloading Antix as I type and will try it out over the next few days. I'm just hoping that it will handle the graphics chip - Ubuntu didn't ages ago.

Then I'm even happier that I asked the question. I hope you come back and say how it went!

May be a few days - there's some sort of festival coming up.

In my experience, AntiX is pretty good with out-of-the-way hardware. My Samsung laptop has Via electronics and I don't think that company even exists now. The graphics processor is a Via Chrome and runs a driver called Openchrome. I have to boot with a special kernel command line parameter to make it work, but with that proviso, AntiX handles it just fine.

Well, I managed to boot it in. The first time it didn't recognise the trackpad so I had to kill the machine. The second time it recognised the trackpad OK but not the USB mouse. But the display was not good - bits of stuff splattered over the screen until I moved the cursor over them. So not really usable. Will have to investigate much further. Or just use the command line, but I think that the site I need to communicate with is graphical (not sure).

Don't worry Tilly, it'll be quite different for you!

You may have the same problem that I had. Try booting with the kernel parameter iomem=relaxed.

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Never fear I have a sense of humour over this ancient laptop. And so far it's not looking like I'll be reunited with it any time soon... Anyway, I hope that 'festival' you said was coming up is proving to be a fun one.

Back to the sheep - in my experience things that go wrong are better at providing learning experiences than things that go right so if it all goes wrong for me I'll focus on what I've learned!

Season's Greetings!